judicial activism

Within the last year and half I have traveled four times to Poland. I have by no means covered the broad expanse of this great country, but I have managed to visit Warsaw, Sulwalki, Lublin, Kraków, Oswęciem, Wadowice; I have spent much time in Katowice in Upper Silesia, and its surrounding towns such as Tychy, [...]

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In the summer of 2016, Cathy Miller, the owner of Tastries Bakery in California, was faced with a difficult decision. As part of its business, Tastries makes wedding cakes, and for the first time, a same-sex couple came in and asked for a wedding cake. Cathy, however, is a devout Christian. As a result, she [...]

Among the three branches of American government, there is supposed to be a system of checks and balances to curb any abuse of power. That is at least the theory. In practice, the judicial branch is now engaged in a campaign of checks without balances or precedent. Judges are becoming tyrants without restraint. It is [...]

When the Supreme Court re-defined marriage in the Obergefell v. Hodges decision to include same-sex relationships, it was immediately clear that this sea change would create a conflict between this newly-discovered constitutional right, and the first freedom listed in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights: the right of religious liberty. Everyone from pundits [...]

In his recent book, Nixon’s White House Wars, Patrick J. Buchanan writes about how most of Richard Nixon’s Supreme Court nominees—Buchanan was an aide to Nixon—did not turn out to be the “judicial restraintists” that the thirty-seventh president had hoped for. Buchanan says that has been a problem for Republican presidents generally. From Nixon up [...]

Is a long-standing commemorative cross on public land socially divisive and a governmental endorsement of religion? Or, to the contrary, is a constitutional challenge to that cross an act of gratuitous social divisiveness? Last week, in American Humanist Association v. Maryland, the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling of the federal district court of [...]

A central principle of the American Founding—in fact, one that great thinkers have held as central for any democratic republic—is the rule of law. We often hear the phrase that we are a nation in which “the rule of law and not of men” prevails. This is another way of saying that law—applicable equally to [...]

“I do not know any country where, in general, less independence of mind and genuine freedom of discussion reign than in America.” ∼ Tocqueville, Democracy in America Alexis de Tocqueville was the great French chronicler of the early United States. Nearly 200 years ago, he spotted a basic tension in our national character. It’s this: Americans place [...]

Just two months after Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) declared a nominee to federal office to be unfit for daring to hold the personal belief that Jesus Christ is necessary to salvation (which was discussed at Crisis by your faithful correspondent here), a fresh controversy has arisen in the hearing chambers of the capitol. This time, [...]

The case of Charlie Gard, the British baby afflicted with the rare mitochondrial DNA depletion syndrome who a London hospital would not discharge to his parents so they could take him to the U.S. for experimental treatment, brought together a number of increasingly portentous trends and realities that have come to define our age. The [...]

“Contemporary liberalism is less a political philosophy than a façade for undermining extant social and legal mores.” ∼ John Safranek, The Myth of Liberalism, 2015. When I first looked into this insightful book of John Safranek titled The Myth of Liberalism, I was struck by the introductory sentence that he cited from Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. [...]

With the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court, many social conservatives breathed a sigh of relief. From what we know of his record, Justice Gorsuch does seem to be a worthy successor to Justice Antonin Scalia. Even if Gorsuch is somewhat less distinguished as a legal mind than Scalia, he is clearly [...]

The Founding Fathers envisioned the Supreme Court of the United States as an apolitical branch of government, co-equal to the others but devoid of any partisanship or politicking. Alexander Hamilton wrote that judges in the new American system would have “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” The question of confirming a justice to the [...]

Last week, California brought fifteen criminal counts against our client David Daleiden. Counts one through eight deal with the 2014 National Abortion Federation Annual Meeting. Counts nine through eleven deal with the two restaurant visits with Planned Parenthood personnel in the Los Angeles area (the videos that reveal "crush above, crush below," and "I want [...]

Recently, I took my son swimming at a local rec center. Entering the men’s locker room, we encountered a sign: “Children over 6 must use the appropriate locker room.” For a moment, I was tempted to speed dial the ACLU and Human Rights Watch to roust some federal judge that Sunday morning who could save [...]

The imperial American judiciary has struck again. This time it has taken upon itself the prerogative to enter a domain that historically it shied away from: national security. A few weeks ago, a federal judge in Washington State stopped the implementation of President Trump’s executive order temporarily halting entry into the U.S. from seven Islamic-majority [...]

I hear frequently in this year’s election campaign that Supreme Court appointments should be the key consideration in the choice between the presidential candidates. That’s certainly understandable, and perhaps true. It reflects, however, an unfortunate attitude—widespread and deeply ingrained in the American psyche—that the Court is somehow the ultimate, sovereign institution in the United States. [...]

The first and last sentences of a Texas Criminal Court’s ruling from earlier this week state: “Defendant David Robert Daleiden’s motion to quash the indictment is pending before this Court ... Cause No. 2071353 is ORDERED DISMISSED for want of jurisdiction.” Those sentences reveal what we at Freedom of Conscience Defense Fund (FCDF) have been [...]

Governments have often minimized religious conflict by establishing one religion and granting it privileges even where others are tolerated. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution left such power to the states, saying only that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion....” Following the enactment of the Fourteenth Amendment, however, the [...]

Recent weeks have seen a sudden slew of bureaucratic and judicial action on the question of public accommodation of self-identified transgendered individuals. In one of the latest moves, a decision from the Fourth Federal Circuit struck down a Virginia school board ruling that children must use the bathroom corresponding to their biological sex. As Hadley [...]

A review in Washington Lawyer magazine of U.S. Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer’s recent book, The Court and the World: American Law and the New Global Realities declared that he “makes a ringing defense of the rule of law.” That was a curious conclusion, in light of how Breyer—one of the most preeminent leftists in [...]